Protocol Extensions and Device Adapter Support

[thern743]

Hello,

With the power of DTDL's extensions, I'm wondering how the ecosystem might empower support for legacy devices and device that operate over different protocols. The examples I'm thinking of are OPC-UA in industrial automation, NTCIP in the traffic management industry, even something like BLE and bespoke protocols. Another big one likely to be of concern eventually will be Matter.

Are there guidelines here for building solutions that can adapt/bridge these kinds of devices using something like DTDL? For instance, are there authoring guidelines on how to create an extension like the existing MQTT extension and/or guidelines on how to bridge these protocols? There is some documentation about how to migrate OWL definitions to DTDL, but I'm looking for broader, long-term vision here in terms of complex IoT ecosystems. If Microsoft were to recommend DTDL as a central modeling solution, how would they suggest a legacy company begin to migrate and bridge their legacy solutions with newer ones?